Elizabeth Foughty

Elizabeth Foughty A pet peeve of mine is when people are told they must improve their exective presence, but given only vague guidance on what this means. That’s not useful feedback to act on. Whenever I’ve been complimented on running a meeting well, or my presence during a presentation, I like to joke that I learned … More What I learned about Executive Presence while coaching preschool soccer

Elizabeth Foughty As a b2b startup*, your first big enterprise deal is the THE deal. Your Everest. It’s the one that takes you from an idea to the big time, and catches the eyes of investors.  It adds credibility, so other enterprise customers feel more comfortable signing on.  A charismatic and/or determined founding team will … More Closing that First Enterprise Deal

Elizabeth Foughty A useful bit of wisdom I’ve gathered from my career is that projects have ‘messy middles’ where everything seems in disarray before it all comes together. This is totally normal, and you shouldn’t freak out (I used to freak out, like a lot). An even more powerful bit of wisdom that it took … More The Messy Middle

readmes, super powers, and team charters Elizabeth Foughty Last week we went on vacation with another family, and I was reminded of how important setting team norms are for successful outcomes. We all know joint family vacations require just as much planning and execution work as any successful work project! We didn’t do this for … More What I learned on summer vacation

Elizabeth Foughty A common challenge I see at an organization? Objectives, strategies and tactics – one of these is missing, people don’t understand what is changeable, or someone has conflated them. For instance – and most commonly – there will be an objective: Grow Revenue.  And tactics: e.g., Increase marketing leads at the top of … More Objectives, Strategies, Tactics and why it’s so easy to confuse these 

Elizabeth Foughty Tl;DR It’s too silo’d and niche otherwise.   Even in large organizations, B2B go-to-market needs to be an overarching strategic ensemble cast, that seemlessly works together.  You cannot and should not have a sales strategy unsupported by a marketing strategy, a product strategy not fed by market insights, a professional services team doing projects … More Why do I always use the phrase go-to-market (instead of just sales, marketing, business development etc)?

Elizabeth Foughty I’ve frequently referred to myself as a recovering project manager when discussing my history in software project management (I never met a Kanban board I didn’t like). But all jokes aside, my background in agile methodologies has been incredibly valuable in customer-facing roles. Drawing from my experience in running agile projects, I’ve observed … More Embracing Agility in Go-to-Market Teams: Lessons from Software Development

Elizabeth Foughty To loosely borrow from Jane Austen, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a company with a new product idea must be in search of early testing customers.” As the Bennet sisters learned in Pride and Prejudice, this process can be daunting. There are countless books written on this subject, but I’d like … More The Most Common Mistake in Early Customer Product Testing